> This is not a remark about AI, but there's something funny about mathematics in that every novel result is broadly perceived as a big deal.

This isn't true using the level of originality you're implying with your software examples.

Technically speaking, many novel mathematics proofs are written all the time (quite a few textbook exercises are actually technically novel problems that have never been posed before they were written in a textbook!) that get absolutely no fanfare. Overwhelmingly though they are not very original or difficult and really just required a fairly routine combination of different pre-existing techniques, even if technically speaking that combination didn't exist before. Those textbook problems are hence easy and therefore not given much public attention even if they are technically novel problems.

Indeed over the course of developing a new mathematical result, many many novel results are glossed over to the extent that even their proofs are left out ("as an exercise for the reader") because they are fairly trivial.

This is true for the overwhelming majority of new software as well. A new CRUD program may, technically speaking, be novel, but it's almost certainly just a routine combination of different pre-existing things.

Mathematics open problems that are actually named are generally problems that have resisted the low hanging fruit of the most obvious combinations of pre-existing problems. When those are solved they are a big deal precisely because they usually require some novelty!

Similarly in software, if someone were to create a new kind of database that solves a variety of new classes of problems that current databases fail to solve that would be a big deal! Truly novel software is also perceived as a big deal. Software that is, technically speaking new, but doesn't actually stray far from a fairly obvious remix of pre-existing techniques, isn't really celebrated.

In both software and mathematics, the intuitive benchmark is if other practitioners in the field look at the result and would say "Wow! How did you do that?" Professional software developers generally don't look at, e.g. a new blogging platform, and boggle at "Wow! How did they make that?!!"